2013-01-10

Hubject : the story so far

I coined the word hubjectback in 2005. At the time I checked the pun was new, or at least unknown by Google. All I found were typos in the spelling of subject. The word and underlying concepts had not the success I secretly expected, adoption was actually limited to a relatively small circle of readers of this blog. Thinking there could be a business model I bought the domain name hubjects.com, which I never used beyond hosting this blog. I used hubject for a while as a pseudonym on Twitter, but with time came to the conclusion that the idea and the word were bound to slowly fade away.
Last year I discovered hubject.com was the Web of a company "connecting emobility across Europe", in plain words dealing with infrastructure for electrical vehicles. What was aimed at being a common name is now the proper name of Hubject GmbH, Torgauer Straße, 12-15 10829 Berlin. I sent them a mail asking if they were aware of previous use of the word, and as of today got no answer [1]
Yet I have not surrendered completely. Yesterday I reinstated the cloud of tags in the left menu. I never liked "tags" too much so I entitled it "hubjects" instead.

That's the story so far. Next summary around 2020.

[1] Update: On 2013-01-29 I eventually received a polite answer from hubject.com. "It is interesting for us to get to know that hubjects is used in a completely different context."